Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at 2026’s Sundance Film Festival, To Hold a Mountain, from directors Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazić, holds its observational vérite as an immediate method of narrativization. This temporal construction of pure linearity, based within a montage that is interested only in the broad strokes of a politics which contends with NATO expansionism, forces the complex of imperial encroachment, generational tumult, cultural continuity, and matriarchal affirmation into a flattened logic verbalized in the soft spoken dialogues between community and ecological activist Gara, alongside her adoptive daughter, Nada, and other members of the rural citizenry based within Montenegro’s Sinjajevina plateau. Tutorov and Glomazić’s perspective is one that stifles the complications of patriarchal violence and geopolitical problematization, comfortably fitting these dynamic and substantial experiences into a distanced portrait of resilience, a word this writer finds invariably reductive, one that more often than not objectifies these histories, as opposed to elucidating them in their knotted discourses.
Consequentially, these texts about the difficult work to confront government and the systemic oppressions it represents becomes transformed into tidy and digestible sentiments, the future being held out as a route toward reconciliation and maintenance, leaving little room for the persisting forces of power that ebb and flow outside of this community’s battle with empire. What are the implications of defeating this campaign of NATO expansionism? How does this project that leads to the exhumation of the community’s own internal problems relate back to the forms of expression of empire? These are questions asked not with hope instead for an essay film or exposé on these connections, but ones to challenge the observational method utilized here — and its very rudimentary montage — as an optimal form to capture this story. The copious amount of creative decisions that could have inscribed into the film’s thematic focus a discursive and reflective ideal are instead dictated by the most crude forms of informational transmission. And even with the community’s victory, which is to be celebrated, platformed, and taken as an example, these processes that led to such a historic gain are so imperceptible across this project. The focus on the daily routines of those who work the land, while impossible to misunderstand as a necessary representation of the relationship between those who fight and what they fight for, are molded into elliptical gestures. What made the substance of their fight becomes cursory, even if that material is also what makes up the substance of how we characterize those present within the film, especially as the documented time progresses.
What is to be argued here is that in the process of creating representation of these relationships across the project, the visual and editorial languages deployed operate less in tune with the labor being both inferred and displayed and more with the distanced, normative methodologies of signaling and shorthand, which very immediately subdue the relationships within a structural ploy of broad legibility. In that, there’s nothing specific or observant regarding the dynamics To Hold a Mountain centers, its construction obfuscating the contexts and opting for something more universalizing. It’s this writer’s opinion, then, that such a methodology dehumanizes these conflicts and envelops them in an industrial hegemony that is ideologically dictated by the very forces that enable NATO to perpetuate its globalizing ambitions. These are ways of filmmaking of which we need to deprogram ourselves.
Published as part of Cinéma du Réel 2026 — Dispatch 2.
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